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alphadogg (971356) writes "Stanford University computer science professor Dan Boneh has been named as the recipient of the 2014 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences http://awards.acm.org/infosys/... his work in cryptography. The award, which includes a $175,000 prize, The award citation formally acknowledges Boneh "For ground-breaking contributions to the development of pairing-based cryptography and its application in identity-based encryption.""Link to Original Source

alphadogg (971356) writes "Website password strength meters often tell you only what you want to hear rather than what you need to hear. That’s the finding from researchers at Concordia University in Montreal, who examined the usefulness of those ubiquitous red-yellow-green password strength testers on websites run by big names such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Microsoft/Skype. The researchers used algorithms to send millions of “not-so-good” passwords through these meters, as well as through the meters of password management services such as LastPass and 1Password, and were largely underwhelmed by what they termed wildly inconsistent results."Link to Original Source

alphadogg (971356) writes "The White House has plucked 28-year-old David Recordon, engineering director at Facebook, as its first IT Director. https://www.whitehouse.gov/blo... A strong open source advocate (OpenID, Open Web Foundation, etc.) with a decidedly non-button-down appearance, Recordon will be charged with modernizing the White House’s technology. Here’s a closer look at one of our newest public servants"Link to Original Source

alphadogg (971356) writes "According to Richard Stallman, godfather of the free software movement, Facebook is a “monstrous surveillance engine,” tech companies working for patent reform aren’t going nearly far enough, and parents must lobby their children’s schools to keep data private and provide free software alternatives. The free software guru touched on a host of topics in his keynote Saturday at the LibrePlanet conference, a Free Software Foundation gathering at the Scala Center at MIT."

alphadogg (971356) writes "One of the most successful U.S. National Security Agency spying programs involved intercepting IT equipment en route to customers and modifying it. It was one of many revelations about the NSA that caused widespread suspicion that U.S. technology products shouldn’t be trusted, even if companies strenuously denied helping the agency. And it appears some Cisco Systems customers have since taken steps to prevent NSA tampering. For example, one Cisco executive said the company has shipped equipment to addresses that are unrelated to a customer to make it harder for the NSA to target an individual company and scoop up their package."Link to Original Source

alphadogg (971356) writes "After a security enthusiast discovered a loophole that allowed him to register a valid SSL certificate for Microsoft’s live.fi domain, he tried to responsibly disclose the issue. But instead of thanks he got locked out of his email, phone, Xbox and online storage accounts. The issue was discovered by a Finnish man who works as an IT manager for a company in the industrial sector."Link to Original Source

alphadogg (971356) writes "A mild-mannered tech and media support coordinator for Oregon State University Extension Service by day, Victor Villegas takes on the persona of The Drone Singer during his off hours. Yes, he fashions himself as the Weird Al Yankovic of drone songs. Following the FAA’s recent launch of a well-intentioned but dull campaign to encourage safe flying of personal or commercial drones (a.k.a., unmanned aerial vehicles or unmanned aircraft systems), the 46-year-old Villegas released to YouTube “If You Get a Drone for Christmas,” his first drone-related parody song designed to get the safety message across in a catchier way."Link to Original Source

alphadogg (971356) writes "MIT is attacking cybersecurity from three angles: technical, regulatory and managerial through three programs and in partnership with major corporations. The initiatives include participants from across several MIT schools as well as from outside the university with a goal of making it harder for attackers to succeed in efforts to break into networks, disrupt them, and steal and destroy data. The technical challenge will be met by the school’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in cooperation with a group of industry partners – BAE Systems, BBVA, Boeing and Raytheon – that will meet periodically to be briefed about ongoing research."Link to Original Source

alphadogg (971356) writes "Google researchers have written the first-ever attack code that takes advantage of electrical interference between densely packed memory cells, a unique style of attack that could require changes in chip design. The work builds on a paper http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~yoon... published last year by Carnegie Mellon University and Intel, which found it was possible to change binary values in stored memory by repeatedly accessing nearby memory cells, a process called “bit flipping."Link to Original Source

alphadogg (971356) writes "Paul D. Ceglia, who was arrested in 2012 for defrauding Facebook on the claim that he owns half the company, is now a fugitive. Ceglia cut off his electronic monitoring bracelet some time around last Friday and left home in violation of the conditions of his bail, court papers said. Ceglia claimed in a 2010 lawsuit that he was entitled to half ownership of Facebook under a 2003 contract with Mark Zuckerberg, who had done programming work for Ceglia’s StreetFax.com."Link to Original Source

alphadogg (971356) writes "A Linux kernel developer is suing VMware in Germany, alleging the company has not complied with copyright terms for using open-source software.Christoph Hellwig, who holds copyrights on portions of the Linux kernel, alleges VMware combined proprietary source code with open-source code in its ESXi product line but has not released it publicly as required by the General Public License version 2 (GPLv2)."Link to Original Source

alphadogg (971356) writes "Google offers lots of services and it has pretty good reliability. How does the company do it? Much of that is up to Ben Treynor, Google’s vice president of engineering, and founder of the company’s site reliability team. And he’s developed an interesting approach at Google for thinking about reliabilityk, and a key part of that is what he calls an "error budget.""Link to Original Source

alphadogg (971356) writes "A setup mistake has apparently left hundreds of thousands of home routers running the SSH (Secure Shell) remote access tool with identical private and public keys. John Matherly, founder of a specialized search engine company whose technology is used for querying Internet-connected devices, found more than 250,000 devices that appear to be deployed by Telefónica de España sharing the same public SSH key. A different search found another 150,000 devices, mostly in China and Taiwan, that have the same problem. Matherly said in a phone interview on Wednesday it is possible the manufacturers copied the same operating system image to all of the routers."Link to Original Source